President Trump, intent on enacting an expansive agenda, has moved at a dizzying pace in the first 100 days of his term, issuing a barrage of executive actions and seeking to expand the scope of his presidential power.
Underlying those efforts is a nonstop distortion of basic facts as Mr. Trump has sought to reconfigure the global economy, reshape the federal government and restrict immigration.
To justify his executive actions and policies, Mr. Trump has relied on false, misleading and hyperbolic claims, deflecting blame for catastrophes, boasting about purported achievements and trying to seek leverage with Ukraine in negotiating a peace deal with Russia.
Here is a fact-check of Mr. Trump’s often-repeated claims.
Federal Cuts
In his breakneck effort to transform the federal bureaucracy, Mr. Trump has offered misleading justifications. He has often echoed dubious claims about so-called fraud made by Elon Musk, the billionaire leading the cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
What Was Said
“Could you mention some of the things that your team has found, some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about $30 million?”
— in a February appearance with Mr. Musk
False. Mr. Trump was addressing Mr. Musk, who responded that employees of the United States Agency for International Development “mysteriously” accrued net worths of tens of millions of dollars while receiving a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars. Mr. Trump’s question referred to Samantha Power, the agency’s former administrator. But Ms. Power’s net worth did not increase by $30 million from 2021 to 2025, as Mr. Trump implied.
Mr. Musk had previously questioned Ms. Power’s net worth by amplifying a social media post that cited “Inside Biden’s Basement,” a website database of public disclosure forms filed by more than 200 Biden administration officials. A White House spokeswoman also cited the website. (The website itself is a project of a political advocacy group staffed by at least one former Trump administration official.)
The website’s database lists Ms. Power’s net worth as $10.1 million to $30.3 million. But her net worth did not suddenly multiply, nor is there evidence that she “walked away with about $30 million.”
Ms. Power joined the Biden administration in 2021. She and her husband, Cass Sunstein, had combined assets — from bank accounts, investment accounts, stocks and retirement funds — of $9.7 million to $26.7 million as of July 2020, according to her financial disclosure form. (The form reports in ranges, rather than exact amounts.) Their income for that year — from Ms. Power’s salary at Harvard University, book royalties, article fees, honorariums and capital gains — ranged from about $1.5 million to $3.6 million.
Those amounts were not significantly different in 2024: assets of $9.7 million to $28.2 million and incomes of $1.5 million to $3.1 million.
What Was Said
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump was referring to, and slightly exaggerating, the findings of an online survey. But official data shows a far larger portion of government employees — more than half — work in the office.
The Federal News Network conducted an online survey in April 2024 asking federal employees about remote work policies. Of more than 6,300 respondents, 6 percent said they worked entirely in person, compared with 30 percent who worked entirely remotely and 64 percent who worked on a hybrid schedule.
After lawmakers and Mr. Musk began citing the survey as evidence of telework abuse, an editor’s note appended to the article in December clarified that the survey was “nonscientific” and that participants self-reported that they were federal workers.
Official data shows a much larger proportion of federal employees working on-site. An August 2024 report from the Office of Management and Budget to Congress said that as of May 2024, 54 percent, or about 1.2 million people, worked fully on-site. About 10 percent, or 228,800 employees, worked remotely. Excluding those workers, about 80 percent of all working hours among federal employees were spent at a work site.
Another budget office report from December 2024 noted that in the 2023 fiscal year, which ended in September 2023, about 43 percent of all federal employees and 75 percent of eligible employees teleworked in some form. Those figures had declined from pandemic-era highs of 47 percent and 94 percent in the 2021 fiscal year.
Immigration
As his hard-line immigration agenda has run into legal challenges and logistical hurdles, Mr. Trump has defended the mistaken deportation of a Maryland resident to El Salvador with inaccurate claims and exaggerated the pace of deportations.
This is misleading. Whether Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a migrant who resided in Maryland and was deported to El Salvador last month, was and remains a member of the gang MS-13 is disputed and unproven. Mr. Trump designated MS-13 and other international gangs as foreign terrorist organizations in February, more than five years after the initial unproven accusations of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s gang affiliations were made.
Mr. Abrego Garcia said he entered the United States illegally in 2012, according to documents released by the Justice Department. One of those documents was a local police department’s “gang field interview sheet” showing that he was arrested in 2019 at a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Md., by officers who equated his apparel — a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie imprinted with money rolls — as “indicative of Hispanic gang culture.” A confidential informant later told officers that Mr. Abrego Garcia was an active member of MS-13, the documents said.
A judge in an immigration court denied Mr. Abrego Garcia’s request for bond, questioning his apparel as sufficient evidence of gang affiliation but deeming the confidential informant’s verification as credible. Mr. Abrego Garcia contested that ruling and argued that the accusation was based on hearsay, but he lost his appeal.
It is worth noting that immigration courts are not part of the judiciary, but rather are housed within the Justice Department. Judges are appointed by the attorney general, migrants do not have the right to a lawyer and proceedings are subject to different rules on discovery and default judgments than judiciary branch courts.
There is no evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia has ever stood trial regarding gang membership or been charged with a crime other than traffic and immigration offenses. Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have argued, both in court in 2019 and now, that he has never been a member of MS-13.
This month, a federal judge also questioned the evidence presented in 2019 and called it “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.” The Washington Post has reported that the police had stopped using the gang field interview sheet over concerns of racial profiling and that the officer who filled it out was indicted and fired over unrelated charges of misconduct.
What Was Said
“We began the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. You know, he was sort of a moderate guy, but he was very strong on the fact he didn’t want people pouring into our country from all over the world. He was very tough. He had the record. We now have the records.”
— at a political event in February
This lacks evidence. The number of deportations conducted so far has lagged behind historic highs.
Mr. Trump’s citation of Eisenhower refers to a 1953-54 mass deportation campaign of Mexican migrants. Historical data from the Department of Homeland Security shows that some 1.1 million migrants were deported in the 1954 fiscal year. The largest number of migrants deported — through removals using formal proceedings like a court order and through returns, which are more informal and include voluntary departures — was more than 1.8 million in the 2000 fiscal year.
Available data shows that deportations so far are nowhere near those figures. According to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University known as TRAC, the Trump administration has removed 27,000 migrants from Jan. 26 to March 8, for a daily average of 661. Reuters reported that removals and returns totaled 37,700 migrants in the first full month of the Trump administration.
Those figures were lower than the daily average of 742 migrants removed in the 2024 fiscal year under the Biden administration and the 57,000 removed and returned in the last month.
Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, said on Monday that 139,000 migrants have been deported since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a daily average of 1,400. It was unclear whether that number included both returns and removals. If the figure encompasses both, daily averages were still higher in 51 out of more than 130 fiscal years for which records exist, including in the 2024 fiscal year.
Mr. Trump is on track to remove and return roughly half a million people altogether this year, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. That, too, would be fewer than the 685,000 removed and returned in the 2024 fiscal year under the Biden administration.
Trade and the Economy
To make the case for his tariff policy, Mr. Trump has turned to a stream of misleading statistics and spurious claims about trade history. At the same time, the president continues to insist that he has already presided over an economic turnaround by exaggerating prices.
What Was Said
Mr. Trump has repeatedly shifted course on tariffs since taking office, imposing steep rates on a range of products globally and then pausing them, singling out specific countries and industries for additional tariffs and then carving out exemptions.
Mr. Trump may have been referring to a calculation from an economic adviser that so-called reciprocal tariffs would bring in $600 billion annually. But the estimate has been disputed by independent analysts and, more important, Mr. Trump paused those tariffs for 90 days before they ever took effect.
A White House spokeswoman cited the United States’ annual trade deficit in goods of $1.2 trillion in 2024, which averages to about $3.3 billion daily, as evidence of Mr. Biden “losing” $3 billion daily. Trade deficits measure the gap between how much a country imports and exports with another, not how much money a country is “losing.” And by that same logic, Mr. Trump is “losing” more: about $4.8 billion daily, based on February’s trade deficit in goods of $135.4 billion.
Releases from federal agencies show that daily revenue collected from tariffs is far short of $2 billion. Customs and Border Protection, which collects customs duties, said in a statement in early April that because of Mr. Trump’s tariff actions, the agency “each day collects over $200 million in additional associated revenue.”
From Mr. Trump’s first full day in office on Jan. 21 to April 23, a span of 93 days, the Department of Homeland Security deposited $41.6 billion in both customs duties and excise taxes, according to Treasury Department data. That is an average of about $447 million daily. (Excise taxes are separate from customs and collected on certain products and imports such as alcohol.)
During the week after Feb. 4, when a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports went into effect, deposits of daily duties and excise taxes peaked at $229 million. In the week after April 5, when a 10 percent tariff on most imported goods took effect, daily deposits peaked at $309 million.
For context, in the last 91 days of the Biden administration from Oct. 18 to Jan. 17, deposits averaged $283 million daily. So while the figure has increased under Mr. Trump, it remains far short of $3 billion daily.
Looking at customs duties alone, the United States collected about $8.2 billion in March and $7.2 billion in February, averaging about $261 million daily. Again, those figures were slightly lower, but not noticeably different, in the last full months of the Biden administration: $6.7 billion in November and $6.8 billion in December, averaging about $221 million daily.
What Was Said
“Egg prices have gone down 87 percent. Energy now is down $65 a barrel. They have some energy selling gasoline for less than $2 in a couple of states, Alabama, a couple of great states.”
— while signing executive order in April
This is exaggerated. Retail egg prices have increased, not decreased, under Mr. Trump. And while wholesale egg and gas prices have declined, he is overstating the degree.
The wholesale price of eggs has indeed fallen by more than half since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, but that decline is not yet reflected in the retail price, which consumers pay at the grocery store.
According to the Agriculture Department’s weekly data release, the national wholesale average has fallen from $6.55 a dozen on Jan. 24 to $3.13 on April 18, a 52 percent decline.
The average price of a dozen eggs in grocery stores was $6.23 in March, the month with the latest available data, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from $4.95 in January and $5.90 in February.
The Agriculture Department predicted in its latest food price outlook that egg prices would increase by 54.6 percent in 2025 compared with the previous year.
Gas prices, too, are not as low as Mr. Trump claimed.
It is true that crude oil was trading at around $65 a barrel, a 13 percent decline since he took office, as Mr. Trump said. But there was no state where the average price was below $2 a gallon at the pump. According to AAA, the national average was $3.17 and the lowest state average was $2.68 in Mississippi on the day he spoke. According to the United States Energy Information Administration, the national average was $3.14 on the week he spoke and the lowest state average was $2.66 in Texas.
Nor were those prices at the pump lower than before he took office. On Jan. 18, the national average was actually lower, $3.12, while the lowest state average was also $2.68 in Mississippi. The week before he took office, the national average was $3.04 and the lowest state average was $2.64 in Texas.
Military and International Conflicts
At home, Mr. Trump has minimized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal, citing a turnaround in military recruitment as Mr. Hegseth’s achievement. Abroad, Mr. Trump has repeatedly put the onus to end the Russia-Ukraine war on President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, sometimes with exaggerated personal attacks.
What Was Said
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump is correct that recruitment in the armed forces has surged, but those trends began before he took office in January and before his election in November.
The Army fell short of its recruitment goals in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, and the Navy and the Air Force failed to meet their targets in 2023. Military leaders have said that the pandemic, a robust civilian jobs market and demographic shifts in physical fitness and attitudes toward services have all contributed to the difficulties in recruitment.
But in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended in September, more than a month before Mr. Trump’s election, the Army, the Air Force and the Marines all exceeded their recruitment goals, though the Navy fell short by about 12 percent. In October, the first month of the 2025 fiscal year and before Mr. Trump’s election, the Army, the Marines and the Navy all exceeded their targets and the Air Force was just one recruit shy of its goal.
At the time, the Pentagon celebrated its progress, with an official noting that the military had taken several steps to improve recruiting by starting a pilot program allowing for medical waivers, connecting with youths through influencers and better explaining the educational and financial benefits. Other military officials have noted that in addition to those yearslong marketing efforts, the Biden administration also increased investments in recruiters through revamped training, incentive pay and promotions.
Recruitment levels actually peaked in August 2024, months before the election and the inauguration, when the Army recorded more than 8,400 recruits. In comparison, the Army recorded almost 6,500 in January and more than 6,000 in February.
What Was Said
“Well, we have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine. Well, we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4 percent approval rating and where a country has been blown to smithereens.”
— in an executive order signing in February
This is exaggerated. Mr. Zelensky’s approval ratings have declined during his tenure, but they have not reached single digits.
When Mr. Zelensky entered office in 2019, 80 percent of Ukrainians said they trusted him, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. That rose to a high of 90 percent in May 2022, in the immediate months after Russia invaded Ukraine, and had fallen to 52 percent by December 2024. That is a drastic decline, but nowhere near 4 percent.
Polling by Gallup also shows a decline from the start of the war, but Mr. Zelensky still retained an approval rating of 60 percent in August 2024.
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